This same exact thing happened to me about 3 years ago.
I turned off the PC yestermorning before I left for work.

I get home from work, flip it on, then go to the kitchen to make my lunch for today.

Go back to the PC shack and it is at a text screen before Windows saying it can not load, and gives me options such as:

Log onto Windows with no networking

Safe mode

Last know good configuration

Normal Windows

None worked, in fact the first two just locked it up at some screen of code.
The latter two would just repeat a boot cycle, and if I did nothing at all, it would reboot on its own and never go into Windows.

It would start with the Welcome To Windows screen and the bars that go across, but then it would reboot.

This morning before work I put in the XP with SP2 CD and choose the format command after setting the BIOS to boot from the DVD drive, and it found my Windows installation, and offered to fix it.

After watching the yellow bar load for awhile, it then said it was good to go and rebooted.
Rebooted not into Windows though, same old thing again.

I ended up formatting and loading Windows onto it before I left for work.
Will be recovering files and aps over the next few days.
Monday morning my external Seagate 200 GB USB drive did a full backup, and I will scan that drive for viruses before I reinstall data.

Now here is the strange part.
I am always upto date on Windows patches, and my AVG version 7 updates itself every morning around 2:30 am.

I wonder if this was some kind of virus, or a weird fluke.
Anyone have this happen before with the same scenario?

An no, I do not surf questionable sites
I was on a Myspace site the other day that I saw linked from an FJ Cruiser owners sig file at another forum.

I hate Myspace, the pages look silly compared to a nice webpage you can make yourself with Frontpage, I wonder if something came through from it?

 

Well, last time this happened, my friends hard drive failed. He would get this problem like every month till it died.

Then again I had a similar issue where all of the sudden my programs became those blank kinda icons, nothing worked the more time went on and I had to format otherwise I got your issue. I believe since I scanned for virus and other junk it is just some kinda windows fluke..

 

Also my last format was two Marches ago, so I was past the one year mark where I normally like to do it.

Heck, last time it did it I was like around two years into the XP install before that happened.

Just do not always have the free time to format and remove a lot of the junk.

Oh, and this is not the same drive as last time, that PATA drive is now my D drive.

The drive that Windows is now on is a Seagate SATA sized at 160 GB.
I still had around 110 GB open on it too.

 

After talking to a guy here at work, he has also seen this before.
He thinks it was the master boot file.

He said at one of the screens where I had the XP CD in I could have got to a DOS (not really a DOS prompt) prompt and typed in a command that is suppose to fix the master boot file.

Is this legit?
And if so, how would you get to a screen where you actually had a prompt since you can not boot into Windows and try this?

PC is almost completely restored.
I got a kick out of Comcast new thing called "Speed Boost."

It ups the speed when you are downloading huge files or multiple ones like the first set if 78 XP updates it detected when I first ran the Windows Update.

It boosts the speed to lightning like speeds for the duration of the download.

Normally I get around 700 to 800 or so KB per second (just under a megabyte per second) but with the speed boost I was seeing speeds of almost 1.4 MB per second, that is fast on cable.
I like
It sure made Windows Update fly bye compared to past upgrades, even with cable.

 

In the XP setup if I recall there is an option that brings up sorta a dos kind of window and you can type stuff.

I cant recall exactly cause I havent done it in some type, but I think its fixboot or something like that for the cmd.

 

 

I've had that problem with all versions of Windows that were bases on NT (Win 2000 and newer). Windows will just stop working randomly after a reboot.

The best that I could narrow it down to was a corrupted file, NTLDR. I have no REAL idea what this file contains, but it is something important. It's about the 20th or so file called upon when Windows boots.

I found no way of fixing the file, it is unique to each system install (as far as I could tell). Even the "XP system restore" and "Repair install" from the XP disk did nothing for the problem. The only fix was the wipe the disk clean and format.

My best guess is just some glitch that happens when the system shuts down, maybe a rogue electrical signal gets generated somewhere, then gets interpreted and written to that file, NTLDR.

 

Yeah, it sucks.
I was not really ready to handle a week of putting it all back on the hard drive after formatting early Tuesday morning, but I am glad it happened now.

The PC runs a lot better and gives me a chance to weed out stuff I no longer use.

Always keep a current backup of your work.

 

Corey, sounds like windows crapped out. nothing new..

You should invest in a program called "Acronis" Ive talked about it on here before.

with Acronis on my machine i have a full IMAGE of my computer with all of my major apps and updates installed. If windows craps out, i get a virus, or my hdd goes bad I can swap the image from wherever i put it when I made the image. I have my image on DVD's. you can also put the backup image on an external hard drive Or you can even create a restore partition like an OEM one that came from dell, except customized to your specs.

its $40 or so..but there are other ways of getting it....

Will cut down your restore time to a few hours..not a few days!

 

Thanks, sounds good, will look into it.
To many DVDs though, as I was using around 50 GB on my C drive.

Would have to keep it on my 80 GB PATA drive or the external.

How does one transfer it though from the other drives if the C drive goes down?
I tried to boot off of my USB external which housed a total backup using a backup app called Bounce Back Pro, but that failed, said key files were missing.

 

you can burn a bootable CD with the entire acronis program in it from within the windows interface.

 

Hit it with a hammer. That seems to fix mine.

 

No, violence only fixes printers.
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